It’s Conrad Black’s world—we’re all just living in it

In 2010, while the subject was still in prison, a friend of mine emailed me the above photo and wrote: “I love how the Post puts this in every weekend. I’m never sure if they mean he’s writing something, or that, like Arthur, Lord Black will return to us in our hour of great need.”

If the latter, then it would seem that this is our hour of need. Black has returned to his natural habitat: the spotlight.

Like the over-the-top coverage of Black’s trial in 2007, there is an immediate cause for this wave of stories about Black: he’s got a new show on Moses Znaimer’s Vision TV (Znaimer,whom we’vewritten aboutseveral times, owns ZoomerMedia, including Zoomer magazine). Black is also still hawking his latest book, Flight of the Eagle.

None of these fully explain Black’s followspot. We have other corporate criminals; we have other TV hosts; we have other press barons. The difference is that as much as we love Black, it’s a mere fraction of how much he loves himself.

Black is a great character for a number of reasons, but stories about him are becoming repetitive. The same could be said of most celebrities, but more Canadian ink has been spilled on Black than perhaps anyone else. It’s not likely to stop: Black will keep writing books, unwillingly-but-willingly going on tours to promote them and fighting to get his citizenship back. After a certain point, these stories about his books and legal travails tell us nothing about either Black or ourselves, except that we can’t get enough of him.